I recommend... But I do have mixed feelings!

This is often very good game - really the x-com combat and potential build complexity is fairly amazing - but it has big flaws and it totally out-stays its welcome. It also has some (later in the game) sadistic mission design that punishes you if haven't been doing enough grinding (I hate grinding so I did the bare minimum and suffered for it at times. That said, I also played it on hard so maybe it is my own fault :).

The core game play is basically X-Com tactical combat. But on top of that is bolted a clumsy visual novel, some light crafting, some light pet training, some light robot building, and some weird extremely light management sub tasks like feeding your family.... er, troops.

As I said, that core game play is great. But the rest is half-baked and in many cases can be largely ignored - except the visual novel... That will be rammed down your throat.

Yes. The visual novel... It is a very anime silly soap opera. It may be better in Korean, but the translations are fairly poor, so in English it is only semi-comprehensible much of the time. By the end I REALLY didn't care any more and was largely just clicking through the waffle to get to the next fight. This aspect needs a huge amount of trimming. editing, and re-translation. Given how important the visual novel aspect is to the game, it would really be worth hiring some professional writers and translators to overhaul this aspect (or for future episodes of the series).

That said, the story does eventually explain why the game is subtitled 'Abandoned Children', which I was wondering about for about 80% of the game!

The world-building and setting is ridiculous. The city you play in - Valhalla- is a war torn anarchistic nightmare ruled over a by a nasty cabal of self-interested corporations, amoral scientists, jaded politicos and foreign interests. Much of the city is over-run by warring gangs, cults, weird sapient animals(!) and robots. It is defended by a barely resourced police department and what are effectively PMCs, most of whom are only interested in taking relatively safe and profitable jobs and letting the public hang.

Yet the standard of living displayed seems to be equivalent to that of a well developed, stable, first world liberal democracy! How does that work?

Also, no matter how many times you defeat the major criminals they tend to turn up again. They have more lives than cats!

Anyway, despite my criticisms, there is definite soul in the story, and even some warm and memorable (if unrealistic and unbelievable) characters. But possibly I feel that way from a form of narrative Stockholm syndrome :).

Music - it is mostly good but there are only a handful of tracks so it does get repetitive.

Dandelion - the dev - clearly love this game, love their story, and love their work. I do think they may shape into a great dev team one day, they are well on the way. But they need to focus on the core game-play rather than throwing in the kitchen sink, shorten the story, and hire pro writers and translators.

Excellent game, so much content, lots of flexibility in character loadouts and roles. If you are a fan of RPGs, XCOM, or tactical turn based strategy you will love it.

GO TO THE END IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ THE ESSAY.


Troubleshooter is what XCOM should be nowdays, hard, customizable, and incredibly fun to play.

Writing

The game is a grid-based Strategy RPG set in an hypotetic future world where, after a tremendous war, Valhalla was founded, an autonomous megalopolis state between the territories involved in it.
Not being able to have an actual army due to its political situation, the crime rate starts skyrocketing, so the government decides to establish the Troubleshooter companies, basically legalizing vigilantism as said companies of talented citizens are allowed to fight crime for money.

The story follows one of these troubleshooter companies in their journey to icrease its "rank", following it in countless missions in their struggle to bring peace to the Wind Wall district of Valhalla, one of the most criminally active of the city.
The story has a very long, almost boring, startup, it gets way better in its middle section, but ends very abruptly, without untagling many of the secrets and characters that are introduced before, some characters don't even have their story arc completely closed, leaving the feeling that there's more to them.
Probably the team understood that they could not make what they originally had in mind or they decided to keep some seecrets for the sequel that is currently in development, who knows, but the pacing problems remain apparent.
Too bad because the worldbuilding is solid and interesting, but the lack of a codex that can remind you names, factions, places, and such can be felt when the game is so spread out.

The main story takes from 60 to 80 hours to complete, depending on the difficulty you're on and the side missions you decide to do, that can each take up to one/two hours to finish.

Gameplay

The gameplay is reminiscing of XCOM, characters take turns depending on their speed stat and move in a grid structure around the maps, if an enemy is in range you can attack with a variety of active skills that depend on the character you're using.
The game also includes a small job system, in fact, despite their standard class, each character can choose between two advanced classes once they reach a certain level, mastering one of them will unlock all active abilities of that class even when using the other one.
New characters will join the troubleshooter company troughout the story, providing fresh and unique gameplay every time.

Difficulty (my experience is on Hard, not the highest)

Despite the simple premises, the game isn't easier than XCOM, despite removing the infamous perma death of the Mythos game, once you lose one pawn, your company can start crumbling quite fast, and i often had to restart entire missions that took me up to two hours because i made a grave mistake.

The Mastery System

The true beauty of this game shows up before taking part in a misson, i'm talking about the "mastery system": Basically whenever you defeat an enemy or complete certain requirements in a mission you can obtain a "mastery", basically a piece of gear that can be equipped to a character and provide (mostly) passive abilities.
This may sound like a standard charm or ring in any other RPG, but the fun part comes in the sheer amount of them you can equip on one character simultaniously (40-50 in endgame) and the variety of available ones (pretty sure there are more than 1000).

The build variety of the game is therefore incredibly stacked, so stacked in fact, that i think i've never seen something like this in a non-MMO RPG; want a tank that can whistand even the hardest of blows? A sweeper that can tear trough the entire map in one turn? A scout that can move long distances? Or an hybrid that can do everything decently? Well fear not, because the limit is only your creativity.

Adding even more sauce to the plate is the "mastery set" system: a set is an additional ability that activates when you have 4 specific masteries equipped at the same time, add this to the regular masteries and the amount of abilities you can have on one character starts going above and beyond what other RPGs do.

Side Content & Endgame

Despite the main missions, there are a massive amount of optional ones you can decide to take on to expand your knowledge of the game world, level up your characters and drop new masteries.
Vendors will also give you side objectives in new or already existing missions in order to obtain more materials for crafting or upgrading, but their level scales way too slowly compared to the story, so the average player will end up ignoring them to avoid doing useless missions 10-20 levels below theirs.
The real side quests are therefore created by the player itself, replaying missions to acquire certain masteries, equipment or materials, leveling characters, and testing mastery builds.

After the main story the game offers a few hardcore missions to complete for the ones who want crave more, with the option to download 2 DLCs, one free, one paid, that add 3 new characters and provide additional content and story bits.

Add up all these features and the game's already long main experience can stretch to hundreds of hours if you ever decided to 100% it.

Other Mechanics

The depth of the game's systems doesn't end with masteries, a crafting system for equipment and deployable drones, a taming mechanic for beasts, a friendship system between characters, online features and a reputation system with vendors will add even more to the already overflowing pot of content this game offers. Some of them can't be completely explored until the endgame or without a substantial amount of farming, and will probably get ignored by many players.

It's probably too much for most people

Despite my excitement I understand that a game this complex could be hard to grasp or even enjoy at all for many players, it feels like Dandylion team kept adding ideas to it without realizing it would be overwhelming for someone who's not very passionate about RPGS to have the will to keep going till the end, in fact as of the writing of this review, only 15% of players have finished the game.

The game fails to find balance between its many systems, some of them being completely optional or straight up negligible from start to finish.
I felt like most of this problems happen to fix themselves in the endgame, where the only thing left to do is optimizing each build to the maximum to take on the hardest stages, but the game is already 100 hours long at that point, and only a minuscule part of the playerbase is going to do that.

TL;DR

Troubleshooter is an outstanding imperfect product, with an incredible amount of subsystems that i've never seen before, not to mention an Indie.

-An interesting worldbuilding that suffers from the lack of a "codex" to remind you of its various aspects when needed, and an overall nice story that ends too abruptly.

-Gameplay reminiscing of XCOM: simple but hard, with an emphasis on the characters' strenghts and weaknesses.
Will keep even the veterans of strategy RPGS on their toes, especially at harder difficulties.

-Character build customization like never before, many options to tune each character exactly how you want it.

-Many subsystems, each having their own complexity, to learn and master, but fail to properly coexist with each other without some of being negligible.

-hundreds of hours of content and a nightmare to 100%, with at least 60-80 of them being needed to complete the main story depending on the difficulty and side missions played.

Overall this isn't a game for everyone, most people will be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of mechanics and subsystems that contribute to the incredible customization freedom this game provides, but i can guarantee that those who do, will find what is probably one of the most unique RPG experiences they've ever played.

Vote: 7/10
Personal: 9/10